Reading The Silence In The Maternal Text Of Carol Shields’Unless

• Authors: ŞEYDA İNCEOĞLU
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article scrutinizes the representation of silence in Carol Shields’ novel Unless. It analyses the problematic behind the mother-daughter relationship between Reta Winters and her daughter Norah by applying the theories of Cixous, Kristeva, Chodorow and Irigaray in relation to maternity and identity. Reta Winters’ so-called ideal life is called into question by her daughter Norah's sitting on the streets with a sign board on her chest with GOODNESS written on it. Reta wonders what she has done wrong throughout her life, and eventually, while writing a novel, starts to realize that she has never created maternal discourse with her daughter. Thus, as the novel unfolds in chapters most of which have adverbs or prepositions as their titles, Reta creates a maternal text, both oral and written, by the end of the story.

Keywords

EN

Carol Shields; goodness; maternity; mother-daughter relationship; Unless

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Gender Studies
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 13
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 66-79

Dates

published

2014-12-01

online

2015-03-25

Contributors

author

ŞEYDA İNCEOĞLU

• Pamukkale University, Çamlaraltı Mh., Pamukkale Üniversitesi, Merkez/Denizli Province, Turkey

References

• Atwood, Margaret. 1979. Surfacing. London: Virago.
• Barthes, Roland. 1990 (1973). Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Caplan, Paula. 2000. The New Don't Blame Mother: Mending the Mother-Daughter Relationship. London and New York: Routledge.
• Chodorow, Nancy. 1979. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.
• Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clement. 1986. The Newly Born Woman. trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Forster, Edward Morgan. 2007. Howards End (with an Introduction by Samuel Hynes). New York: Bantam Dell.
• Hirsch, Marianne. 1989. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• Irigaray, Luce. 1991. The Irigaray Reader. Ed. and with an introduction by Margaret Whitford. Oxford and Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
• Irigaray, Luce. 1981. “And the One Doesn't Stir Without the Other”, trans. H. V. Wenzel, Signs 7(1).[Crossref]
• Jacobs, Amber. 2007. On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis, and the Law of the Mother. New York: Colombia University Press.
• Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Leon S. Roudiez. (Ed.). New York: Columbia University Press.
• Ritzer, George (Ed.). 2004. Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Sage Publications.
• Shields, Carol. 2003. Unless. London and New York: Fourth Estate.
• Walker, Michelle Boulous. 1998. Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading Silence. London and New York: Routledge.
• Whitford, Margaret. 1991. Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. London and New York: Routledge.

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/genst-2015-0005